How to Tackle Spam With The BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

BuddyPress spam is a perennial problem that can negatively affect your social network. At times it can seem like weeds taking over your beautiful garden. Everyone knows what it’s like to receive spam emails but when your members begin receiving spam messages through your community, they may feel as though their profile, participation and experiences are not secure. That is why, when building a community, it’s important to maintain good spam protection; a spam-free experience produces subtle confidence that will keep your users returning.

Stephanie Leary has developed a plugin that does two things to help you quickly combat spam on your BuddyPress site:

Adds the “Mark as spammer” link back to the admin bar

Adds a “Spammer” button to the activity stream entry meta row

Below is the new “Spammer” button that lets you easily mark a user as a spammer from the activity stream, which is where you most often become aware of spammers having infiltrated your community:

The BuddyPress Spam Link plugin is currently available for download from github. Stephanie is considering adding it to the WordPress repository, depending on how discussion shapes up regarding this related ticket in trac.

How to Use the BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

Download the buddypress-spam-link.php file and upload it to your plugins folder. Alternately you can copy the code from that file and add it to your bp-custom.php file. However, I’d recommend keeping it as a separate plugin for the sake of troubleshooting and updating.

Killing BuddyPress spam accounts goes much faster with the BuddyPress Spam Link plugin installed. Many thanks to Stephanie Leary for making it available to the community on github. This plugin is a must-have for BuddyPress community managers who want to be able to quickly combat spam as soon as it’s reported.

Sign up for more WordPress wisdom

140+ Plugins & Themes

9 Responses

Nas

I’m having difficulty getting this to work. I’ll admit I’m inapt at this, but I’d like to get it working. I have downloaded the file from Github and I tried installing it after extracting it from MySite/wp-admin/plugins.php and since it isn’t a zip it wouldn’t install.
I then tried the bp-custom.php method (http://codex.buddypress.org/extending-buddypress/bp-custom-php/) the problem is that file isn’t there by default and I’m not sure how to create a file from the website in the Plugins folder….sorry, but help?

Sarah, I already tried that link (it was in my first post), and didn’t have luck because it has generic instructions, and not detail for those that are lost like myself. I also think the instructions have to do with the application for windows? I’m using the online only method, and I don’t see options to create files, and I mean specifically files in the plugin folder or .PHP files. I also looked at the file structure of things with FileZilla (an FTP client) and I don’t see a Plugins folder. I have the file and I even edited the file to be like that in the BP-Custom.php example from the link you gave, which means it has the correct opening and closing statements. I did not alter the other code. Thank you for your help :)

@Nas Im sorry that you were not able to get adequate help. Its annoying when people post links assuming you know how to do it yourself. Here is what you need to do

1) Login to your hosting server or FTP to your plugins folder.
2) Once there, you need to “create new file”
3) Name that file “spam.php” – (like I did) or choose any name and make sure you put “.php” at the end
4) Copy the code from the above GITHUB link into that file
5) Go to your wordpress site and activate the plugin “Buddypress Spam Link”

If you are unable to do the above, you can create the file using notepad. Open notepad and copy the file code into it. Get ready to save it. In the savebox dropdown options, choose to save the type as “All files” instead of .txt. Then, choose a file name and add the “.php” extension to the end of the file name. Finally, upload that file into your plugins folder and activate the plugin. If you need help, reply to me as I’m following these comments.

Thank you very much for your reply. I do have the file and it is ready in the .PHP format.

I connected into our server with FTP. Poked around more and found the plugins folder, and boom…it works! I even edited the code to say “Mark User as a Spammer” instead of just “Spammer” having the Spammer link under a users’ name seemed misleading for good users.